Towards Geographies of Silence: Unspoken Boundaries

ABSTRACT Despite its social and spatial significance, silence remains an under‐explored and under‐theorised subject in geography. This paper addresses this lacuna by examining silence as a boundary‐making practice in geographically distant relationships. Silence as boundary‐making is used as a new frame for conceptualising transnational intergenerational acts of care and the complexity that characterises transnational family life. These conceptual discussions are empirically examined through the experiences of transnational families whose lives stretch between Brazil and the United States. The analysis shows how research participants conceal, select, avoid, redirect and reframe conversations in order to sustain and protect relationships embedded in, and strongly affected by, broader structures of inequality. The paper puts forth a fourfold typology of silence as boundary‐making and shows how these evolving boundaries, shaped by tacit agreements, tactics of withdrawal and self‐disciplining, function as acts of care and ways to avoid negative emotions, self‐preservation, controlling self‐image and as forms of resistance and empowerment. The paper's conceptual discussion and typology lay the foundation for a broader research agenda that attends to the significance of silence in geographical research.